Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Minnesota book club leader Beatrice Johnson was apprehended by authorities yesterday. Reportedly, she dashed into the midst of traffic, stared at a SUV for a moment, and then placed her palm up towards the oncoming vehicle. She squinted her eyes and furrowed her brow. Thirty year old Johnson stood in the way of a collision with her hand out and was saved at the last second by a passing pedestrian. Beatrice claimed that she had been disoriented and had thought she could slow the car with her mind.

The woman had spent the last three weeks reading The Hunger Games, Twilight, and concluded the showerless trek of time with the Harry Potter series. She had ingested so much fantasy into her mind that she now thought it real.

“It’s quite common,” said Dr. Polowski, a specialist in fantasy literature’s effect on the psyche of lonely people. “These kids, or adults in increasing cases, read the books for over ten hours a day, and then they think that they exist in the rules set up in that fictional universe.”

For example, in Georgia earlier this week a woman thought she was the girl with the dragon tattoo, so it could have been worse.

“I just....” stuttered poor Beatrice. “I was reading fantasy for about five hours and I just was so absorbed into the storyline that when I came out of it, I thought I had powers for a little while. It’s not a big deal. Calm down.”

“This is getting out of control,” said therapist Steven Tyler. “Fans of fantasy everywhere are losing their grip on reality. A man in Oregon thinks we have a half black president.”

Reportedly, the lonelier a reader is, the easier it is to lose themselves in children’s fantasy literature. The results of this study are sponsored by a party display store that specializes in Edward Cullen costumes.

Fans of fantasy novels everywhere are beginning to lose themselves into escapism and forgetting how the rules of reality works. It’s charming when it’s a ten year old who thinks she’s going to find love someday, but it’s almost dangerous when it’s a thirty year old who believes in telekinesis.